Santoro: Pack's sum is greater than its parts

If the NCAA men’s basketball tournament started this week the Nevada Wolf Pack would be solidly in the mix, likely given something like a No. 10 seed and considered one of the teams nobody wants to play.

The Pack is sailing along right now at 12-1 as one of just 16 Division I teams with fewer than two losses. Nevada is coming off a great Christmas weekend, winning three games and the Diamond Head Classic championship in Honolulu. The Pack, which received 13 votes in the latest Associated Press Top 25 poll and three votes in the Coaches Poll, whipped Temple, TCU and Georgia Tech in Hawaii and barely broke a sweat.

It’s the best Pack start since Eric Musselman’s final Wolf Pack team opened 14-0 in 2018-19 and was ranked No. 6 in the country.

The Pack fun should continue in its final non-league game this Saturday at home against Fresno Pacific and in its first two Mountain West games against Fresno State (Jan. 6) and Air Force (Jan. 9) making coach Steve Alford’s surging team 15-1 overall and 2-0 in league play and ranked among the Top 25 teams in the country.

What does it all mean? Well, it means this Pack team will have to fall flat on its face to not get invited to the NCAA tournament in March. The Pack got to the tournament last year with just 22 wins so they are more than half way there already with 19 games left in the regular season and likely two or three more in the Mountain West tournament.

We are likely looking at a 25-plus win Pack team rolling into the NCAA tournament as a single-digit seed.

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This Wolf Pack team, however, probably doesn’t scare anybody on paper or even face-to-face on the floor.

It’s biggest strength and, by far, the biggest reason it is 12-1 right now, is its ability to get to the free throw line. Nevada is seventh in the nation with 19.6 successful free throws a game.

Can Nevada count on that stat holding up all year as it has to deal more and more skittish, easily-influenced Mountain West officials on the road?

This Pack team isn’t great at anything else. It is 95th in scoring (78.7 a game), 47th in defense (64.8), 160th in assists (13.8 a game), 249th in bench points (18.5 a game), 147th in rebounding (37.38 a game) and 311th in 3-pointers (5.7 a game).

All of those numbers should not add up to a 12-1 record right now. But that is where the Pack currently sits because this team has what the numbers can’t add up.

This team is consistent, well-coached and does what it is told to do by one of the most underrated coaching staffs in the nation. Alford and his staff, which annually deals with transfer portal runaways (last spring it was escapees Will Baker and Darrion Williams), is making this team believe in itself. Alford had given them an easy-to-understand and apply formula that makes this Pack sum much greater than its individual parts.

Alford’s Pack gets to the free throw line, takes sensible shots, avoids serious foul trouble, plays solid defense, hustles, fights for rebounds and doesn’t throw the ball all around the gym. This is a team that plays for each other and its coaching staff instead of individual agendas.

It’s heart and soul is an experienced corps of veterans (Jarod Lucas, Kenan Blackshear, Tre Coleman, K.J. Hymes and Daniel Foster), an ultra-consistent sophomore blue-collar worker (Nick Davidson) and a try-hard bench (namely Hunter McIntosh, Tyler Rolison, Tylan Pope) that isn’t afraid to make its presence known.

That’s how you get a team that is currently ranked 36th in the nation in the latest NET Rankings and 16th in RPI and is solidly in the mix for the NCAA Tournament with two-plus months to go.

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The Mountain West will not be easy for this Pack team. Nevada’s 12-1 record has been largely built at Lawlor Events Center (where it is 7-0) and against the likes of Sacramento State, Pacific, Portland, Montana, Loyola Marymount and UC Davis.

But that is also part of good coaching. You build a non-league schedule that builds your team’s confidence.

That confidence is why it was able to go to Honolulu last week and beat Hawaii in a non-league game and then Temple, TCU and Georgia Tech in the Diamond Head Classic. Don’t forget the win at Washington in Game 2 that paved the way for the next 10 wins.

This Pack team isn’t winning with magic, mirrors and sleight of hand. It is playing team basketball in an era of selfish, look-at-me players. It’s average victory has come by 16.7 points.

That’s not pulling a rabbit out of the hat. That is playing the game the right way each time you step on the floor.

Also don’t forget that while this team has a lot of experience, it is also a patchwork group. Hymes has been with the program since, it seems, the time of short shorts and crew cuts, but most of that time he’s been on the bench nursing injuries.

Pope only joined the team for the first time in Hawaii last week. McIntosh only stepped on the floor for the first time at Nevada very late last year. Rolison is a freshman. There are three more freshmen (Amire Robinson, Jazz Gardner, Isaac Hymes) on the bench waiting their turn.

The real test is the Mountain West schedule. Utah State (12-1), New Mexico (11-1), Colorado State (11-1) and San Diego State (10-2) have records just as shiny as Nevada’s record. Boise State (8-4) is as talented and well-coached as any team in the league.

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It is not all that easy to come up with legitimate highlights from the 2023 calendar year for Wolf Pack football and men’s basketball.

Football coach Ken Wilson was fired Dec. 1 after his second consecutive 2-10 season. His highlight in 2023 was an ugly 6-0 win at San Diego State.

Alford’s Pack hoops team did go to the NCAA Tournament back in March but it was part of the bogus First Four round and even that turned out to be a nightmare with a one-sided loss to Arizona State (98-73) and two former Pack players (Dez Cambridge and Warren Washington).

Last January gave us an exciting double-overtime basketball win over New Mexico and an impressive win over future Final Four team San Diego State, both at Lawlor.

But if basketball wins in January are your highlight for the calendar year, well, 2024 has to be better.

It should at least be an interesting 2024 as far as men’s basketball and football are concerned.

Football has a new head coach and a new energy. This March could be special in basketball.

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The transfer portal has simply ruined the excitement of college football’s signing day.

Signing day, which used to be in early February, was always one of the best days of the year. It was a day of hope and dreams and the promise of future championships. Now it barely gets noticed.

Hardly anybody even knows when football’s signing day is now. In case you missed it, the early period signing day was Dec. 20. It had all the hype, hoopla and excitement of a spring practice in April.

There will be another signing day Feb. 7, in case you have nothing to do that day.

Getting a signed National Letter of Intent on signing day from a recruit used to mean something. It usually meant that player was signing over his next four or five years to your school.

Players now sign a National Letter of Intent out of high school or junior college and then jump in the transfer portal a year or two later if all goes well.

Why even bother signing high school seniors or junior college players? If those players turn out to be great or even just competent they are likely going to leave a NIL-deficient school like Nevada through the transfer portal the first chance they get.

Bowl games used to be (three and four decades ago) meaningful and exciting. But then they tripled and quadrupled the number of bowl games and now nobody but bettors care about them.

It’s the same with signing day. There used to be one. Now there are two official ones and dozens more in the spring and summer because of the transfer portal.

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The San Francisco 49ers got a wakeup call on Christmas night, losing at home to the Baltimore Ravens, 33-19, in front of the nation.

Brock Purdy looked like, well, the last player picked in the NFL draft. Nobody else in red and gold stepped up either, including coach Kyle Shanahan.

The 49ers likely went into the game a little too confident because of a six-game winning streak and an impressive 42-19 win over the Philadelphia Eagles three weeks earlier. The Christmas holiday at home (as opposed to being shut away in a hotel like the Ravens) also likely didn’t help.

The good news for the 49ers is that the Ravens are in the AFC and won’t be a road block on the way to the Super Bowl.

San Francisco is still the best team in the NFC. The only goal now is to make sure the NFC title game is in San Francisco and not Philadelphia.